Imagination

When I was around six years old, I had a lot of problems falling asleep. I would try and try to fall asleep, but for some reason I would just lay there with my eyes closed and never fall asleep. On the worst nights it would take me somewhere between a half an hour to an hour to fall asleep. After years of having this problem, I decided to take the problem and try to fix it. What I created was something that helped me for years and years to come.

I have always been an imaginative person, pretty much since the day I was born. When I was young I used to have a few imaginary friends. We would play together, and it was nice because I didn’t need any real people to hang out with. I didn’t come up with the imaginary friends to avoid actual people, or to escape from reality; I simply did it because it was fun to play with people who had any personality that you wanted them to have. This lasted for a few years until one day I decided I didn’t want to have imaginary friends anymore. It was also around this time that I began having trouble sleeping at night. Roughly three out of five nights a week, I would either sleep in the bed with my parents, or sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of their room. For some reason, It comforted me to be in my parents room when I slept.

This behavior went on until I was about 8 years old, when I finally figured out a way to fall asleep. It started one night as I was lying in my bed, when I just started imagining things. I imagined that there was a secret passage under my bed and it led to a huge underground tunnel under my house. I entered the little secret passage and there was a bright light that made my eyes hurt. Past this light was a world of paradise and everything cool. Fast cars, any kind of candy you can imagine, and any scenario that I could think up was possible in my little dream world. At the time, I didn’t realize that this was actually my own mind helping me fall asleep. I have always had high levels of stress and anxiety, which sometimes make me have trouble concentrating. As I got older, that began to develop even more and soon I needed to take medicine for my anxiety. This helped a little bit, but it didn’t help with my sleep problem. I mentioned the sleep problem to my doctor, and he said that it was a common side effect of my medicine. But I had been experiencing this for practically my whole life. So I kept on imagining before I went to sleep. I did this for around five more years until I finally didn’t need to do it anymore and I could fall asleep on my own.

When I was young, I was very caught up in my emotions and my anxiety, and sometimes I had no medium with which to escape for a while, until I discovered my own imagination. Sometimes you have to literally take matters into your own hands, and help yourself.

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Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.